Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
This settler often dreamed of a substantial country
house like those of the gentry that rose along the rivers
of the East. This log building would be temporary, and
when his fields ran wide and the roads reached out
from the teeming towns, he would build again. And
the log house would be put aside for use by visiting rel-
atives, or as servants' quarters — eventually even to be
stuffed with hay.
D. A. Hutslar offers a historic comparison of log
house versus log cabin in the journal
Ohio History.
Cabins, he notes, were of unhewn logs, chinked with
rails and moss, straw and mud. Roofs were covered
with long staves with weight poles, which are poles
laid on the split roof shakes to hold them in place.
There were no windows or chimneys. Log houses, on
the other hand, were hewn, with stone and plaster in
the chinks. The roofs were shingled; there were glass
windows and chimneys.
It's a bit difficult to imagine a cabin with no chim-
ney, yet the early ones often had no more than a hole
in the roof for the smoke from the dirt-floor firepit to
escape through. This was common in the peasant cot-
tages of Britain. The gable-end fireplace so common
in America developed in 15th-century England.
Shortly thereafter, with the upper area now free of
smoke, the use of loft space for living quarters became
common. In central Europe, the chimney was usually
in the center of the house.
The settlers from the tall ships anchored off
Jamestown and Plymouth had been, for the most part,
town dwellers. Although many were skilled carpenters
with tools at hand, they had no knowledge of, or ex-
perience with, log construction. They set about reduc-
ing the formidable forest trees to whipsawn boards
and riven clapboards to nail onto hewn timbers, just
as they would have done in Europe. Housed tempor-
arily in huts of sailcloth, branches, and thatch, they
endured rain, cold, and Indian depredation while
laboriously fashioning the kind of houses with which
they were familiar.
They could have had snug, safe quarters of logs
almost from the first, had they so chosen. Most histo-
rians are of the opinion that these immigrants just
didn't know how to build with logs until the Swedes,
Finns, and Germans brought their skills with them
later in the 17th century.
Cabins today are being restored, often with added logs and modern
additions. This one in Missouri was moved twice, with replacements
both times.
However, because logs were used early for stockade
walls, forts, and even jails, it's more likely that the first
settlers clung to their complicated house-construction
practices as a link with a culture they feared would
soon fade into the wilderness. History is full of
accounts of civilized people thrust into the wilds,
clutching remnants of their ordered, familiar pasts.
The very persistence of hewn logs instead of round
logs in the houses of the pioneers is as much a cultural
matter as a practical one, given the relative labor and
skill involved in building this way. Barns, corncribs,
even temporary dwellings and hunters' shacks could
be of round logs, but not the house in which the pio-
neer wife was to keep and raise her children. This
house must have some pretensions to gentility, if only
flat walls.
Remember, the wife was probably the moving force
behind those pioneers-turned-planters, who rose
from owning nothing but wild land to the ranks of the
